What Can Lent Offer Us? - 10,000 Fathers & Mothers

My first encounter with Ash Wednesday came my freshman year of college. I vividly remember the moment when our NT professor came to class late from a noon service with a smeared black cross on his forehead. I had zero context for his appearance, but as he gave a brief explanation my first thought was: “I can’t believe this Assemblies of God university let him do this!” From that first encounter I, like many, thought Lent was unnecessarily dark and morbid. But I have since learned that there is a deep wisdom Lent offers that is not easily discerned – but that the church desperately needs.

Lent comes from an old English word that literally means “spring.” The purpose of Lent is something like “Spring cleaning” in preparation for Easter. For all the green thumbs out there, think of it as tending to your garden after the long snowy winter – getting rid of the debris of dead leaves and branches that the snow has pressed deep into the soil.

Lent makes time for Spirit-led self-evaluation and the de-cluttering of our lives to make room for the growth of New Creation as we approach Easter.

To enter into Lent is to embrace our common participation in the life, suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And while self-denial and introspection are important, they are unto creating more room for Christ’s life to flourish in us for the good of our neighbor.

Joel 2:12-14a

12 “Even now,” declares the Lord,
“return to me with all your heart,
with fasting and weeping and mourning.”

13 Rend your heart
and not your garments.
Return to the Lord your God,
for he is gracious and compassionate,
slow to anger and abounding in love,
and he relents from sending calamity.

14a Who knows? He may turn and relent
and leave behind a blessing—

What about this peculiar text? “Blow the Trumpet! Sound the Alarm!” is Joel’s outcry. He has received a vision of this coming day of darkness and he warns the people. This particular warning is that the “Day of the Lord” is near.

God was coming for them, and he is coming for us. Not to destroy us, but to destroy the things that are already destroying us that we don’t have eyes to see yet.

Ash Wednesday comes to us like the sounding of an alarm leading us into Lent – a prescribed interruption in the Church calendar – to awaken us. If we have ears to hear it, we will find it to be a gift of grace through the Church Fathers & Mothers to call us back to faithfulness.

The central theme of Ash Wednesday and Lent is repentance. But interestingly, this Ash Wednesday passage names no particular sin; it doesn’t really reference sin at all. If you’ve read the prophets, you’ll know they’re not bashful to call out the direct unfaithfulness of their own people – often in explicit detail. But this too brings us back to the heart of Lent.

We are called to repent of our sins, but not just the sins we can think of and name. Our repenting must go beyond that, to the aimless wandering that lulls us into a life where we talk about God and even do things for God while our hearts remain distant, hardened, and numb.

Singer-songwriter Nick Cave describes sin as “forms of bad practice that weigh us down, suffocating us, so that we become less and less capable of joy, sympathy, gratitude, kindness, and peace.”

Therein lies the peril of sin. It isn’t that sin offends God in some moralistic sense. It’s that sin dis-integrates us and makes us inwardly conflicted so that we live in resistance to our calling; it pulls apart what God is drawing together and distorts how we see ourselves, God, and our neighbor. What is more: we sin because we have been sinned against. Before any one of us ever commits a sinful act against another, we have been sinned against by someone else. We are always impacted by the transgressions of others, and apart from the grace of God, we turn and wound others in countless ways.

We might sum it up to say: Sin makes us less human and less humane. And repentance sheds us of all that suffocates our humanity and makes reconciliation to God and neighbor possible.

What does it mean to repent? How can we return to God “with all of our hearts”? Joel calls the people to fasting, weeping, and mourning. The presence of a list at all indicates that our hearts need help turning back to God and shedding the layers that have been weighing us down. These are not listed as a series of obligations we must fulfill in order to return. No, these practices are handholds that guide our wayward hearts back to God while we are coming out of the dark.

For true repentance to take place our whole hearts must return to God. The call is to rend our hearts, not just our clothing. In other words: give yourselves to fasting, prayer, giving, and tears but let them flow from the inside out. Engage these practices as a way of allowing your heart to open up to God, and he will tend to your rent heart in a way that heals you and makes your good works healing to those around you. While only God can make a hardened heart soft or bring a dead heart to life, he engages our agency by calling us to co-operate with these practices. Let yourself feel the hunger, weep over the burdens of your neighbor, and grieve over what our sin has done. Through it, God is turning and reviving your heart.

On Ash Wednesday we have ashes imposed on our foreheads as a reminder that we are dust. We are creatures whose lives are held, not by our own hands, but by the hands of God. And more, we are dying creatures. To dust we shall return. This is an inescapable reality. But what I didn’t know 20 years ago in that college classroom is that Ash Wednesday can be heard as good news – as promise – because our mortality and sinfulness no longer have the finality that they appear to have.

The central message of Holy Week is that, in Christ, God has taken our mortality and sinfulness as his own so that our lives could be taken up into his. This is why we impose ashes in the shape of the cross: to remind us that it is precisely as mortal and sinful creatures that we have been called to return to God who, in turn, shares with us his own life.

I have been captivated by this verse from our Joel passage, “Return to the LORD, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in love, and he relents from punishing. Who knows? He may turn and relent and leave behind a blessing –” (2:13b-14a) A hint of promise in the midst of a great warning that the Day of Darkness is coming! But here’s the question: What if God’s desire in coming really is to leave behind a blessing? What if God’s desire is to always leave behind a blessing?

Our sin – and our shame over our sin – makes it so that his coming feels like a threat. But repentance enables us to receive his coming as a blessing. So what if this call to repent and return is God’s standing invitation for us to become the blessing he is leaving behind for the sake of the world?

This Lent, I pray that the Spirit will give us the grace to repent, to draw near to God, and to live boldly into our calling, to be the residue of God’s blessing that lingers in the world. Amen.

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